Public safety users (e.g., police, fire fighters, and other responders) often need to access Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) at incident scenes and/or during mutual aid scenarios at foreign locations outside their home coverage area. Some WLANs may be public, whereas others may be private.
Private WLANs usually require that the public safety user's wireless communication device (WCD) has access rights to access the private WLAN. Access to such private WLANs can be controlled, for example, by knowledge of the WLAN's Service Set Identifier (SSID) and/or a secret security credential (e.g., a pass phrase, a key or a password).
As such, obtaining the appropriate security credentials and securely transferring them to the public safety user's WCD at the time of an incident can be cumbersome and lead to loss of critical time.
One solution for providing security credentials is to manually configure each public safety user's WCD with a complete list of security credential information needed to access all WLANs that may potentially need to be accessed (e.g., the security credential information for all nation-wide or state-wide or even county-wide WLANs).
However, this approach can be impractical due to memory constraints of the WCD. In addition, security credentials may get updated periodically, which would require re-configuration of the WCD each time this information is updated.
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The apparatus and method components have been represented where appropriate by conventional symbols in the drawings, showing only those specific details that are pertinent to understanding the embodiments of the present invention so as not to obscure the disclosure with details that will be readily apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art having the benefit of the description herein.